Tuesday, August 14, 2007

How to enable Windows Terminal Services home drive redirection on Windows 2000.

User’s home location, specified in the user Active Directory account object, normally points to a network location. However, this reconnection takes up a considerable amount of time during user logon. A feature available within the Microsoft Windows system allows the server to redirect the user’s home location to a local drive. But this feature is available as a default for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and above. All is not lost for Windows 2000 as Microsoft has provided a feature fix for users of Windows 2000.

What is required here is that a Microsoft-provided patch can be applied to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Server to take advantage of this feature. The Hotfix description can be obtained from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843261

This hotfix can be applied to the server and home location re-direction setting can be configured in the Windows Registry. Details follow:

Hotfix Executable: Windows2000-KB843261-v3-x86-ENU.EXE

Settings applied:

Key: HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services

Value

WFHomeDir

Type

REG_SZ

Data

E:\DataHomedrives

Description

This configures the home location for all users that log on to the server

Value

WFHomeDirDrive

Type

REG_SZ

Data

H:

Description

Drive letter for the mapping if the WFHomeDir is a network location. This is not required but here we set it to H:

Value

WFHomeDirUNC

Type

REG_DWORD

Data

0x0

Description

This indicates if the data set in the ‘Value’ above is a UNC path

E:\DataHomedrives must be configured to give the server local ‘users’ group read/write permissions.
With this configured, E:\DataHomedrives will be filled with folders and files for each unique users that log on to the servers. These folders and files are temporary. Therefore, for housekeeping purpose, a script can be incorporated into the server startup file to perform regular clean up.

The registry values above can be applied via the Active Directory Group Policy objects when you want to manage it centrally on a collection of servers.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Fifth-generation video game consoles in Malaysia

Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, and Micorsoft XBOX 360 are not available in Malaysia while countries like Singapore and South Korea already have all of them launched since early this year. The main reason is because of the relatively high software piracy rate. This deters game manufactures and producers from wanting to plant their presence in a market which does not have mature intellectual property protection.

1st Generation - Atari, NES
2nd Generation - Super NES, Sega Saturn
3rd Generation - Playstation
4th Generation - Microsoft XBOX, Playstation 2
5th Generation - Nintendo Wii, XBOX 360, Playstation 3

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Adapting to changes for survival

Giant super- and hypermarkets are losing out to the competitions because of silly regulations that they impose on customers. Such regulations will drive customers away. For example, they prohibit customers from taking any forms of bags including backpacks into the shopping areas. Also, no cameras allowed...but they let people with mobile phones (with camera better than some older Point & Shoot's) in! What dinosaur is that?

And most importantly, their prices are most often the most expensive no matter how hard they try to fool us.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Microsoft releases updates to improves performance and compatibility issues with Windows Vista

Microsoft has just released a couple of updates to some issues with Windows Vista.

Performance issues with Windows Vista have been experienced by some corporate users.

An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=938194

An update is available that improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=938979

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

《東方日報》 - 教車業吁整頓革新 考車制助長貪風

An article in Oriental Daily talks about the corruption in the Malaysia driving test academy.

《東方新聞網》- 教車業吁整頓革新 考車制助長貪風

I remember since at a very young age I already knew that corruptions have already been rampant so the question is why does it take so darn long for something like this to be reported?

This, my dear ministers in the parliament, is one of the reasons we have seen accidents on our Malaysian roads. Putting drivers who would have failed driving and law tests behind the steering wheels of road vehicles means we have incompetent drivers prowling the Malaysian roads. And the drivers may not even realize when they do not follow the rules or break the laws.

Lacking some sense of responsibility?

Recently it seems that the competency level of some people in our service provider is deteriorating. What happened is that they have the nerve to ask us to give them the answers that they should have found out themselves. We do not know the answers ok so what we could have done is doing what any competent team will do...start researching. So go and do your homework and don't run crying for help.

Electronic Money vs Cold-Hard Paper Currency

There have been some debates going on within my community that predict electronic money will eventually bring on the demise of paper currency globally.  Some has even said that this will happen in 50 to 60 years time.  My view is that even if it is possible, this cannot be done without re-introducing all the inconveniences that in the first place, made paper currency a reality.